46 reachable by the means of empiricist science, “moral certainty.” Thus, knowledge was not understood, as in medieval thought, as referring solely to the logically demonstrable.5 This development did not leave law untouched - least of all, the law of proof. The changes that the law of proof went through as it passed from the Middle Ages to the early modern period clearly reflect the tendencies described above. Parallel with the development in areas of thought such as science, history, and theology, jurists began to understand the notion of certainty in terms of degrees. In the medieval theory of legal proof, confession or the statements of two eyewitnesses corresponded to the truth; consequently, one eyewitness’s statement can only convey half of the truth, a half proof, on which no punishment could be founded. When, with the rise of empiricism, the idea of a strict correspondence between signs was no longer adhered to, it became possible to conceive of a lesser, but convincing proof as sufficient enough to warrant a criminal sanction, although of a milder kind. Alegal truth, a decision of fact, could nowbe based on a probability. Thus were matters of truth and proof seen by the rationalist natural law thinkers of the Modern Age such as Grotius, Locke, Wolff, Montesquieu and Beccaria. Judicial truthwas of no absolute value to them, but rather a matter of degrees and relativity. It was toward a presumption of truth, and no absolute verity, that judicial proof strove.^ In England, law of evidence began to employ terminology similar to that of science; in practice, this came to mean grading of evidence on scales of reliability and probability. Similarly, on the continent, philosophers like Samuel Pufendorf and Leibniz tended to include judicial fact-finding in their all-encompassing empiricist conception of science. Different branches of thought stood in a close mutual relationship to each other; law did not, any more than theology or history, develop in an intellectual void.^ It is no wonder that, together with the transformation of philosophical and scientific conceptions of truth and probability, a major change occurred in the lawof proof. It is important to note that these fundamental changes in general scientific philosophy and the lawof proof took place in the seventeenth century: as the legal theory of proof was starting to sift down to the Swedish judicial practice in that century, the theory had, then, undergone fundamental changes in other parts of Europe. As Schnapper remarks, as the national legal systems began to grow more heterogeneous from the sixteenth century onwards, a considerable regional variation in the evidenciary doctrine and legislation emerged."^ Therefore, it is Shapiro 1983 p. 4. On the seventeenth-century epistemological rupture, see also Foucault 1970 pp. 17-30, 58-59. Foriers 1965 p. 169-171. ^ Shapiro 1983 pp. 167-169. ** Schnapper 1974 p. 89.
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